How COVID‐19 informed the future impact of the specialty of physical medicine and rehabilitation across the health care continuum

Abstract

The effective end of the poliomyelitis pandemic in the United States. Beginning nearly 60 years earlier in 1910, a viral pathogen infected 600 000 people and took the lives of 60 000 of those who became infected. People who did not succumb were left with a myriad of physical impairments including muscle weakness, fatigue, impaired breathing, and musculoskeletal pain. Although President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was undoubtedly the country’s most famous polio victim, the main protagonist of the decades-long saga was a selftrained Australian nurse by the name of Sister Elizabeth Kinney (the moniker “Sister” representing a chief nurse in WWI, not a member of the clergy) who arrived in the United States in 1940, ultimately finding symbiosis at the University of Minnesota. Sister Kinney’s then revolutionary treatment methods for the devastating effects of polio—including moist heat therapy for polio-induced muscle spasm, joint mobilization to prevent contractures, and muscle “re-education” to regain function—were not universally respected. She eschewed prolonged immobilization and became the leading proponent for early reactivation of people with polio. Many of her principles and practices aligned with the nascent field of physical medicine (soon to become physical medicine and rehabilitation, and a board-certified medical specialty, in 1947).